Harry Potter and Ginny Weasley Are Dating
by Lomonaaeren
Summary: HPDM slash, onesided HPGW. Harry thinks he and Ginny are dating. Ginny, who doesn't want him, must send him back into the waiting arms of Draco. A story of love and Quidditch. COMPLETE.


**Title: **Harry Potter and Ginny Weasley Are Dating

**Disclaimer: **J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.

**Pairings: **Harry/Draco, one-sided Harry/Ginny

**Rating: **PG-13

**Warnings:** Profanity, crack, Ginny POV. Ignores the epilogue.

**Wordcount: ** 4000

**Summary: **Harry thinks he and Ginny are dating. It's up to Ginny to correct the misconception and send him into the waiting arms of his patient lover. Well, perhaps not so patient. A story of love and Quidditch.

**Author's Notes: **So, after all those stories where Ginny is in love with Harry and he's not interested in her, I thought it was time for Ginny to have some revenge.

**Harry Potter and Ginny Weasley Are Dating**

There was a letter waiting for her on the table when she got home from practice. Ginny raised an eyebrow and picked it up, turning it over. She had been expecting a Howler from her mother for some time now, because the chances that she was ever going to settle down and find a nice husband were decreasing, but this obviously wasn't it.

She recognized her name on the outside, and the handwriting. Smiling, she opened it. She hadn't heard from Harry in a while. It would be pleasant to have something to think about right now other than how much her muscles hurt and how she'd fumbled the Snitch catch that evening.

_Ginny, _said the scribble at the beginning. Ginny frowned. Harry didn't write her name like that, most of the time. Was he in trouble, or hurt?

_Ginny, I know that you said you broke up with me, but I also know that you said you would give me one more chance. I'm asking for that chance now. I love you. I can't go on without you. I know that I—_

There was a long dashed line on the parchment then, as though someone had seized Harry's quill and wrenched it sideways. Ginny blinked and skipped down to the next legible paragraph.

_It might not seem like we should be together, but I promise, we should. Just give me the chance, and you'll see why we should._

Ginny closed her eyes and counted to ten under her breath, in Spanish. She'd learned the language a few years ago, in the delightful whirl of freedom and activity that followed her realization that she was out of Hogwarts, out of the protection of her family, and out of her smothering relationship with Harry, and it was useful for numbers and swear words.

She liked Harry. She really did. He was still funny and brave and unusually modest about his defeat of Voldemort. They'd broken up in a way that meant they could remain friends, and Ginny was glad of that. His leaving her had nothing to do with her and everything to do with his preferring cock, which was a reason she could live with.

But he had seemed to think that his preferring cock was some huge sin, and that she would be the love of his life. The "chance" he was referring to was a comment Ginny had made about how they could try again if he decided he was straight. So far, it had mostly resulted in Harry coming to her when he was drunk and had just broken up with someone, lamenting that he should have married her.

Besides, the last thing Ginny knew, he'd been living with Draco Malfoy. Ginny couldn't imagine that Malfoy, having got Harry, would ever let him go, to marriage or otherwise.

She sat down and wrote a response, tossing her hair impatiently to the side so that the sweat wouldn't drip on the parchment and make the ink run.

_Dear Harry,_

_I know that you think things like this sometimes, but you know we would be miserable together. Accept what you have, even if it seems like trouble right now, and make the most of it. I think you can be very happy with Draco if you try. _

It was a struggle, sometimes, to make herself call Malfoy by his first name, but it was worth it to see the smile that lit Harry's face when she did. And the confused expression on Malfoy's face—the darting looks he gave her, as if she might be setting up an ambush for him on the side—amused her, too.

Ginny wrote her name, sealed the letter, and summoned her well-trained owl, Helga, with a snap of her fingers. Then she went to take a shower, grimacing as she ran her fingers through her thick red hair. She could use charms to dry the sweat, sure, but it never felt the same, and it also tended to dry out her skin.

* * *

"What exactly were you thinking, Weasley?"

Ginny scowled at the ground. She had to wonder if the Harpies' coach, Glenda Halloway, was some long-lost relative of her mother and Madam Pomfrey. All Halloway had to do was speak a few quiet words, and Ginny felt as ashamed and humiliated as though she'd deliberately upset her.

"I was thinking that I could circle under the Snitch and pick it up when it came out of its spiral," Ginny said. She thought about it and then added, "Ma'am," to the end of her spiel.

Halloway sighed, a lengthy procedure that seemed to use up all the air in the room. "You didn't do that," she said. "You almost fell."

"But I didn't!" Ginny said, stung into retorting. Of course, the moment she looked up, she regretted it, because Halloway's eyes were liquid with disappointment. Ginny looked down again, playing with her hair. "Almost," she added.

"Yes, that little word," Halloway said, and shook her head gently, and stalked out of the tiled room where the Harpies kept their official team robes, the balls, and any number of promotional materials. The little Ginny in the exact center of the poster hanging on the wall right now gave her a look of commiseration

Ginny banged her head against the wall a few times to relieve her feelings, and then went to strip off her robes and get into the shower. She ordinarily waited until she was home for that—the Harpies' showers had a nasty tendency to run out of hot water in the middle—but this had been a long practice, even without the near-fall, and she wanted to feel cleansed and cool now, not twenty minutes from now.

"Ginny! There you are."

Ginny couldn't help it; she spun around and shrieked, clutching her robes to her breasts to cover them. Harry stood behind her, and he watched her with a gleam in his eyes that was, frankly, disturbing. Ginny took a deep breath and told herself that it was all right, Harry was a friend and nothing more, and even if he _thought _he was interested in her, he would at least accept a sharp warning to back off, unlike some of the Harpies' more obsessive fans. "Harry," she said flatly. "What are _you_ doing here?"

Harry blinked and shifted his weight, as if he had anticipated a warmer welcome. "Well," he said. "We're dating."

"We are _not_," Ginny said. Keep her voice cool and uninviting, and there was the chance that he would go away. Harry was a lot more sensitive to changes of mood than anyone thought he was. "Go back to Draco. Follow the advice that I gave you in my letter. You'll be a much happier man."

"But you said that you would offer me one more chance if I wanted it," Harry whinged. "And I do want it. I'm not happy with Draco anymore. I don't know that I ever was. And I know that you're pretty." He looked up at her through his eyelashes.

Ginny shook her head. This was something else no one seemed to know about Harry: he was a good manipulator, and he knew it. Even Hermione was prone to fall for this trick he had of peering up helplessly and sticking his lip out. "Go home, Harry. Work out whatever row you're having with Draco. You knew that he wouldn't be easy to live with when you chose him."

"I didn't choose him," Harry said. "He chose _me_. He chased me until I gave in."

Ginny smiled in spite of herself. From the little she knew of Draco and Harry's courtship, it really had happened exactly like that. "Fine. But you and I aren't dating anymore. I don't _want _to date you. You don't want me, and you certainly don't want a woman. You just want some fantasy of happiness where no one ever argues."

"Yes?" Harry asked in an experimental tone, as if trying to figure out what was wrong with that.

Ginny shook her head. "I don't want to date you," she said. She would have wanted to be kinder, but she was tired, _still _sweaty, and confronting someone who didn't appear to understand what a refusal meant. She was sure he had a few years ago, and when she'd seen him since then, he hadn't appeared to change that much. She wondered if being with Malfoy corrupted people whether they wanted to be corrupted or not.

Harry's face fell for a moment. Then he said, "But you could give me a chance, the way you were talking about all those years ago, and that would mean I could have a chance to change your mind."

Ginny wanted to bang her head against the wall again, but God knew what interpretation Harry would put on _that_. "I'm not dating anyone right now," she said. "I want to concentrate on my game."

Harry beamed. "I know! That's what makes it so great! I could help you with your Seeker skills, and that way, you would get better at Quidditch, and make more money, and then maybe you would want to marry me."

"How did you—no." Ginny wasn't really interested in how he had got the idea that she would want to marry him if she was wealthy. "Seriously, Harry, go home. I know that Malfoy's jealous, and he's probably going to blame me for encouraging you if he learns that you came to me."

"We broke up," Harry said in a small voice, and brushed his toe back and forth over the floor, staring down.

Ginny sighed. Was why it always _her _lot to deal with these problems? Hermione was better at offering advice. "I'm sorry, Harry. But even if you're single right now, and you want to date me, then I still don't want to date you. So we're at an impasse." Harry looked up with his brow furrowing, and she knew that he was going to ask what the word "impasse" meant. "Go away," she added, with a ferocious scowl.

He retreated with many wounded looks, but Ginny had become immune to those years ago. When he was finally gone, she ducked into the shower and sighed as the hot water poured over her skin, wishing it could wash away the residue of contact with someone else's stupidity as well as it did the dirt and heat.

* * *

Ginny whirled to the side and bent down from her broom, one hand extended. She could feel the Falcons' Seeker coming up behind her, driving his broom frantically, but the wind and the luck and the skill were with Ginny today. The Snitch dived into her hand, and Ginny held it up and turned her hand around so that the entire stadium could see.

The crowd went mad, leaping to their feet and applauding so hard that Ginny thought there would be bloodied hands later. She hovered steadily in the air so that she could accept the piling hugs of her teammates, the sullen nod of her fellow Seeker, and the adulation that rang from the announcement of the Harpies' victory.

Back in their private rooms, even Halloway was impressed enough to nod at her, and Anna LeFoi, one of their Beaters, was laughing so hard over the expression on the other Seeker's face that she fell off the bench. She lingered behind when the rest of them were gone to gossip, but broke off an entertaining story about her sister, a bulldog, and the insipid wizard her sister had been engaged to to demand, "Is that really Harry Potter over there?"

Stomach close to rebelling, Ginny looked. Yes, it was Harry, glancing around the room as though he hadn't been in there last week. She sighed, buried her face in her hands, and shook her head.

"You really don't want him, huh?" Anna asked sympathetically. She had been Ginny's first friend on the team and the only one that she'd talked about her difficulties with Harry to. Even Ron and Hermione sometimes listened and sometimes acted as though they thought Harry and Ginny would make a great couple.

"No," Ginny said. "He's so—so soppy. Even if he wasn't bent, it wouldn't have lasted. He thinks that he wants me, but what he wants is something that he imagines I can provide him."

Anna nodded. "I had one of those once. And they never even notice how selfish they're being, because, for them, it's all about true love." She nudged Ginny in the ribs as Harry saw them and started towards them with a hopeful expression on his face. "Go break his balls."

Ginny nodded back and marched over to Harry. He had his hands behind his back, and she experienced an overpowering sense of dread even before he took them out and revealed a dozen rather wilted roses.

"Congratulations on winning the game!" Harry said, blinking at her over the top of the flowers. One of them was broken and sagging, and Ginny could see a brown color creeping into the leaves of the one nearest her. "I wanted you to have these."

"Thanks, Harry, they're lovely," Ginny said, in a voice that should have warned him he was in trouble, as she took the roses and cast a charm that ought to enable them to survive outside water for a time. But Harry was oblivious, or at least could be, to nuances, and he wriggled like an excited puppy when she took the flowers.

"Would you come out with me tonight?" he asked, and tried to give her a winsome look. It made him seem as if he had indigestion. "I think that you deserve dinner for winning the game. My treat."

Ginny glanced over her shoulder and nodded at Anna. Anna knew what that meant and was already backing up and casting a Silencing Charm on her ears. She remained in sight, though. Ginny knew that she would want to observe what happened next.

Ginny turned around and made her voice loud and cutting, the kind of tone that she had used before on the practice field or during the game when someone was cheating and she needed to let Halloway know.

"_Fuck _no."

Harry's face fell, and he stared at her as though he didn't understand. Ginny knew that his stubbornness amounted to stupidity sometimes, but she really thought she would have got through before now. "But—why not? You're not dating anyone else, I'm not dating anyone else, and we could get married…"

"You're obsessed with getting married, aren't you?" Ginny said in the same cut-glass voice, although not as loud as before. She had observed that Harry's right pocket was bulging oddly, and a sudden suspicion consumed her. She cast a Summoning Charm, and the pocket bounced and spat out its contents.

Harry tried to grab it, but it was too late. Ginny held a box, and when she flipped it open, there was a ring. It was all cool silver and diamonds, she noticed in the midst of her anger, very pretty but not her taste at all. Which, of course, told her why Harry was carrying it around in the first place.

She glanced at him. "Your proposal was going to be tonight?" she asked.

"I, er," Harry said, and then tried to rally and make the best of a bad situation. "Ginny, will you marry me?" Ginny thought he actually might have got down on one knee if she hadn't shot out her hand and stopped him.

"You want to marry Draco," she said. "Not me. You were going to marry him before you broke up, right?" She shook her head, and handed the box with the ring back to him. "Harry, go and propose to him, you stupid berk."

Harry once more looked tragic. "He broke up with me. He won't want me back."

"Why did you break up?" Ginny asked, but Harry avoided her eyes and frowned at the floor. She shook her head again. "Go away. I don't know how often I can say that before you'll understand. You're not usually this dumb."

As she had thought would happen, a reference to his intelligence made him stomp out, though he cast her a longing glance over his shoulder. She sat down on the bench. Anna took off the Silencing Charm and came over, giving cautious glances at Harry's back.

"He really wants to marry someone, doesn't he?" she asked. "A martyr to domesticity."

Ginny nodded. "Yes. He doesn't even care who it's with, as long as he has a family of his own." She tried to feel pity for Harry—she knew what his childhood had been like and why he wanted a family so much—but it drowned in her exasperation. "Of course, he should really marry Malfoy, but try telling him that when he's in this mood."

Anna laughed. "Perhaps you should go the other way around, then, and contact Malfoy. If he knows that his boyfriend still wants to marry him, then you might get some support in driving Potter off."

Ginny thought Anna was startled when Ginny hugged her out of the blue like that, but it was justified, in Ginny's opinion. Sometimes it took someone outside the situation to see the best solution for it.

* * *

"I want to know why you called me here, Weasley."

Ginny took a deep breath and finished closing the door behind her. She should have expected this. Malfoy was in some secretive field at the Ministry, perhaps the Unspeakables, or else a shadowy agency in the back of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement. It made sense that he would show up in her flat without a sign of his having picked the lock or disrupted the wards.

"Because I want to know why you broke up with Harry," she said, turning towards the sound of Malfoy's voice.

He had already moved, and now the sound of the voice came from the ceiling. Ginny carefully didn't roll her eyes, since she thought he would probably be able to see the disdainful gesture from that angle. "Why does it matter? He's gone, and he's not coming back to me." His voice thickened with the sort of self-pity that Harry did so well.

_Perhaps they broke up because they're so similar and neither of them could stand to be around each other any longer, _Ginny thought, then decided it didn't matter. The plan she had in mind would work just as well without knowing the reason. "Harry came and asked me to marry him," she began. "I—"

A throwing knife pinned her robe to the floor, and then Malfoy was on her in a swirl of charcoal-grey cloak and long pale limbs. His eyes were furious. "What did you say to him?" he snarled, bending her backwards. He smelled faintly of fire.

Ginny had expected something like this, and it had happened too quickly for her to be afraid. She took a deep breath and answered, "I find it annoying that he wants to marry me, and I wish he would go away. But he had a ring with him, one you would like. I think he really wants to marry _you_ and is just using me as a substitute."

Malfoy paused and rocked back on his heels, then began to prowl back and forth in front of her. Ginny exhaled and bent down to check the knife through her robe, not quite daring to remove it yet. At least it looked as if the tear would be small and easily taken care of with _Reparo._

Malfoy spun around and stabbed a finger at her. He had a scar on his face that he hadn't had the last time Ginny saw him. She knew she could ask and he would fob her off with a ridiculous load of bollocks about how people had died for asking about his job, so she kept silent. Her curiosity was doomed never to be satisfied where Malfoy and Harry were concerned, and she was fine with that as long as they stopped bothering her.

"What did the ring look like?" he demanded.

"Silver and diamonds," Ginny said promptly.

"It's the kind of thing that wouldn't suit you at all," Malfoy sneered, sweeping his eyes up and down her body and then turning away. Ginny snorted mentally. Malfoy was nothing much to look at, either, pale as a vampire and with hair like clotted cream that Ginny was convinced he dyed, given the darker roots showing through. "How did Harry act when he came to see you?"

"Desperate," Ginny said. "He wants a family. He wants to settle down. And he comes running to me the minute he breaks up with you, not because he wants _me_, but because his best choice was gone and he was falling back on the second best one."

She knew Malfoy would like to hear her calling herself second best, while she didn't mind because she had long since ceased to measure her worth by what Malfoy thought of her. Sure enough, he beamed and preened a bit, then fixed her with a sharp glare and said, "Did you encourage him?"

"I encouraged him to go back to you," Ginny said. "I don't know if he will." She hesitated, then added, "I imagine it would depend on what kind of reception he gets."

Malfoy paused, then vanished into the shadows again. Ginny heard a window open and shut, and when she looked around, Malfoy was gone. She pried the knife out of her robe, repaired the tear, and went to make dinner.

She had to laugh aloud later. She'd found some pale powder under a chair that, when she tested it with a basic sourcing spell, did indeed turn out to be hair dye.

* * *

_HARRY POTTER AND DRACO MALFOY ENGAGED!_

Ginny sighed in relief and shook her head at the front page of the paper as she started drinking her tea. "You're not more relieved than I am," she told the screaming headline.

She skimmed through the article beneath the photo of Harry and Malfoy holding hands and kissing, then looking properly bashful when the cameras clicked. The article only repeated what she already knew, though: that Harry was going to ask Malfoy to marry him, that "peculiar circumstances" had intervened—the writer seemed to think it was Malfoy's job—but that the wedding was back on now. She was most occupied in looking at the picture, since she would never have believed that Malfoy could look bashful if she hadn't seen it.

And she lingered on Harry's happy expression, too. She savored it, and hoped he would. Yes, there would be problems in the future, but this was really the best course for him.

Hermione's owl, Rowena, brought a letter just as Ginny was finishing breakfast. Ginny fed her a piece of bacon and sent her off to visit with Helga; they had been nestmates. The two owls poked at each other's feathers and hooted softly while Ginny opened the letter, anticipating that it would be about Hermione needing a babysitter for the weekend, which she often did.

Instead, the writing dashed across the page, and there were several small wet spots that might be the result of tears. Ginny frowned and sat up.

_Dear Ginny, _

_I'm sorry to write this to you, but I don't know who else to turn to. I just—I had a fight with Ron, and he said some things, and I said some things, that had me questioning my sexuality. I think I might be interested in women, and specifically in you—_

Ginny was a bit late to practice, given that she had to clean up the scorch mark from the middle of her table.

**The End.**


End file.
